Albert Schäffle - The Theory and Policy of Labour Protection

Mining industries, industrial (manufacturing) work, and wage service in trade, traffic, and transport, do not all receive an equal measure of Labour Protection.

Differences in the danger of the occupation play a great part in the labour-protective legislation of every country.

Labour Protection has therefore hitherto been, and will probably for some time continue to be in effect, protection of factory and quasi-factory labour (I.B. 2, supra ), but in all probability it will gradually include protection of household industry also. Even the English Factory and Workshop Acts do not, however, extend protection to wage-labour in family industry.

Business managers have hitherto received no protection, or a much smaller measure than that extended to common wage-labourers.

Furthermore, Labour Protection has hitherto been administered through different channels, according as it is applied to professions of a public nature, in which discipline is necessary, especially the military profession, or to professions of a non-public nature.

Lastly, with regard to individual differences of need for labour protection, adult labour has hitherto received only a restricted measure of protection, whereas the labour of women and children has long been fairly adequately dealt with; the prohibition of employment of married women in factory-labour still remains an unsolved problem in the domain of Labour Protection question, but it is a measure that has already received powerful support.

It must of course be understood that Labour Protection is still in process of development. But according to all present appearances, there is no prospect, at any rate for some time to come, of its general extension to all classes of industrial wage-labour, for instance that the prohibition of night work will be extended to all adult male labourers, or that Sunday work will be absolutely prohibited in carrying industries and in public houses. We must even do justice to the Auer Motion in the Reichstag, by acknowledging that it does not go the length of demanding the universal application of such protection.

In the existing positive laws, and in the further demands for protection put forward at the present day, mining industries hold the first place, then all kinds of work dangerous to life and health, household industry, the labour of women and young persons, and the labour of married women. The reader will easily understand the reasons for this; he only requires to establish clearly in his own mind, for each of these classes of industrial wage-labour, the grounds on which the claim to such objective and subjective protection is based, and wherein they differ from the cases where free self-help and mutual help suffice, or even the ordinary protection afforded by the State. However, this special inquiry is not necessary here; the explanation desired will be found in the study of the several applications and modes of operation of Labour Protection dealt with in the following pages.

But on the other hand it is important that we should now endeavour to form a clear idea of those larger divisions of industrial wage-labour with which a protective code has to deal, in order that we may be sure of our ground in proceeding with our investigations.

No small difficulty arises from the question: “What is factory-labour?” And yet it is precisely this kind of wage-labour which has received the most comprehensive measure of protection, and become the standard by which protection is meted out to all similar kinds of employment.

The labour-protective laws of various governments have met the difficulty in various ways; but nowhere is a positive legal definition given of the Factory.

In the case of Germany, especially, it is not easy to form a clear idea of the meaning attached to factory labour by the hitherto existing protective laws, and by the von Berlepsch Industrial Bill.

We may arrive at a clearer conception of what a factory really is in the protective sense of the word, by examining first the essential characteristics of such kinds of employment as are placed by the protective laws on the same (or nearly the same) footing as factory labour, and then observing the peculiarities of such kinds of employments as are legally excluded from factory-labour protection.

The same characteristics in all those points in which it is affected by protection, will be found in the Factory, but the peculiarities of the other contrasted class will be absent from the Factory.

In the Imperial Industrial Code, especially in the von Berlepsch Bill, the following four categories of employment are placed on the same footing as the Factory; in the case of the first three the inclusion is obligatory, in the case of the last it is optional and depends on the pleasure of the Bundesrath (local authority):

1. Mines, salt-pits (salines), preparatory work above ground, and underground work, in mines and quarries (other than those referred to in the Factory Regulations).

2. Smelting-houses, carpenter’s yards, and other building-yards, wharves, and such brick-kilns, mines, and quarries as are worked above ground and are not merely temporary and on a small scale.

3. Those work-shops in which power machinery is employed (straw, wind, water, gas, electricity, etc.) not merely temporarily.

4. “Other” workshops to which factory protection (except as regards working rules) can be extended under the Imperial decree, at the discretion of the Bundesrath. 5 5 Bill, Art. 6 (new § 154).

A common designation is needed which will include all these four categories.

We might use the word “workshops” were it not that the employments enumerated in classes 1 and 2 cannot precisely be included in “workshops,” and were it not that class 4 as it appears in protective legislation denotes “another kind” of workshop distinct from that of class 3.

In default of a more accurate expression we will use therefore the term “quasi-factory business” as a general designation for those classes of business which are placed by the protective laws on the same, or approximately the same, footing as the Factory.

Factory protection is not extended to those “workshops in which the workers belong exclusively to the family of the employer,” therefore not to family-industry in workshops, and still less to family-industry not carried on in workshops, nor to work in the dwelling-houses of the employer, or (as is usually the case in household industry) of the worker (orders of all kinds executed at home, household industry). At least the new § 154 of the Bill does not bring such work into any closer relationship than before with the Factory.

By contrast and comparison the following characteristics ( a to i ) will help us towards a fuller conception of the sense of the Factory from the point of view of protective legislation, as understood by the latest German enactments:

a. The Factory employs exclusively or mainly those who do not belong to the family of the employer, and in any case not merely those who do .

b. The work of a Factory is entirely carried on outside the dwelling of the employer and of the wage-worker.

c. The work of a Factory is the preparation and manufacture of commodities (industrial work, including all kinds of printing), not production or first handling of raw material, as in mining industries.

d. The work of a Factory is work in which the wage-workers are constantly shut up together in buildings or in enclosures, and is not work in open spaces, or which moves from place to place, as in the case of work on wharves, in building yards, etc.

e. The work of a Factory is carried on by power machinery, hence (if this inference a contrario be admissible) not only hand-manufacture, and thus it appears to include what I have called quasi-factory business and have mentioned in class 3 ( supra ).